Creating a Night Scene from a Daytime Drawing

This is a simple method of taking a hand drawing and turning it into a night scene using Photoshop and a couple of very quick digital modifications. I’ve always struggled to simulate a night time scene with traditional hand drawings. I found it nearly impossible to render the evening illumination from storefronts and the dramatic contrast between dark shadows and lighted spaces....until now!
A quick and effective way of creating the wonderful quality of evening light is to layer over your hand drawing with a transparent black overlay in Photoshop, then erase portions of it where the light occurs. I created this sketch for a recent studioINSITE project and turned my original hand drawing of a daytime scene into the night scene for the title slide in a PowerPoint presentation. My step-by-step process is explained below:

Initial Overlay and Trace Drawing

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